30 Days of Email Domination: On the Dot

By Sol in Blog

It took exactly 20 minutes to process my email today. I would have liked to come in under 15 minutes again, but there were a lot of messages today. This makes keeping track of how many messages are processed per minute very useful. Today’s average of 11.3 messages/minute is ever so slightly faster than last week’s average of 11.1 messages/minute.

Yes, we’re shooting for total time spent processing email, not percentages, but I’ll take an improvement where I can get it to keep momentum going.

Management on the decline

I am also spending less time on email management tasks than I was even just a few weeks ago. Last week required less than a minute (00:49), and while things weren’t as blazingly fast as that this week, I still spent less than 2 minutes (01:40) in the trenches. Not too shabby.

As usual, Gmail’s Smartlabels are doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting, with only a few erroneously-labeled messages getting past them. I really hope Smartlabels moves out of Gmail’s Labs soon and becomes a permanent feature. Managing email would be a lot more tedious without Smartlabels.

In all honesty, the sender causing me the most hassle these days is Facebook, with their numerous emails about “people I may know” that I continue to receive despite unsubscribing every single time. I’ve begun employing a new tactic this week and am simply marking all Facebook messages as spam. Hopefully Gmail’s excellent spam filter will get the idea before long and take it from there so that I don’t have to see these messages any more.